The Practice of Intention
This last July I provided the program for the week-long Seabeck Christian Family Camp. I chose as my topic “Life as Pilgrimage.” If you have been following me at all over the last few years you will know that I have ventured out a handful of times on reasonably ambitious pilgrimages—a 4,000-mile pilgrimage through the Western U.S. by bike, a “Rome to Rumi” pilgrimage where I cycled from the Vatican in Rome to Rumi’s Tomb in Turkey, and my most recent 500-mile walk across northern Spain on the Camino Frances.
But when I teach about pilgrimage I reinforce that my goal is not to get people to carve out ten weeks of their life to walk or cycle across some sacred land. If they can do that, great. But, my goal is to share what I have learned about being a pilgrim so that people can approach life as pilgrimage. A pilgrim approach to life is very different from the more conventional American approach of “building the life you want.” Pilgrims allow life to shape them rather than the other way around.
At the Seabeck Camp in July, I focused on four practices that I believe embody living life as a pilgrim. My next four blogs will focus on those four. They are:
The Practice of Intention
The Practice of Trust
The Practice of Receptivity
The Practice of Embodiment
THE PRACTICE OF INTENTION
I remember when I first discovered that pilgrimages are about intention. I was about 1,000 miles into my 4,000 pedaling pilgrimage through the Western U.S. When I departed from Portland I had planned ten weeks for the full 4,000 plus miles. That was the time I had requested off from my church position. If I was to honor that I would need to cover 400 miles per week. But two weeks into the pilgrimage I started to feel like my plan was dictating the pace of the pilgrimage rather than the needs of my soul.
Elizabeth, Warmshowers host in Bozeman, MT
I was staying with one of my hosts, Elizabeth, in Bozeman, Montana when I voiced to her my concern that I wasn’t going to be able to complete the 4,000 miles in the time I had been allotted. I still remember her face when she looked at me and said, “What? You can’t just email them and ask for a little more time?”
It was obvious to her that I was letting my plan sabotage the whole purpose of the pilgrimage—to discover something about myself during a significant time of transition and loss in my life. I originally committed to the pilgrimage out of this need to discover what my soul most desired, but once I put the plan in place, I started worshiping the plan and not the purpose.
That lesson has come back to me many times since then. When I teach about this I often use this one line that captures what I have learned.
“Unmet goals are often considered failures. There is no failure with intention; only discovery.”
It can be a subtle difference, the difference between planning and intention, but it is very important difference. At least for me when I plan something I completely organize my life around that plan. I say yes to some things and no to other things. If an obstacle appears I find a way to go around it, over it or under it, or dismantle it. I march forward with single-minded determination. Pretty much nothing gets in the way of the plan.
But when I step into something as an intention I leave myself open to what I might discover along the way. I might follow through on my intention to the last mile or last commitment, but I will also allow things to shift based on my original purpose. Changing course in not a failure if you discover the course isn’t going where you need it to go.
This is a lesson I am only slowly learning. By the time I committed to my second pilgrimage from “Rome to Rumi” I was starting to get the hang of it. In September of 2014, I set off from the Vatican in Rome and gave myself anywhere up to ten weeks to reach Rumi’s Tomb in Konya, Turkey, about 3,000 kilometers away by land. The purpose of the trip was to work my way through what I believe is a major cultural shift we all are experiencing from religious orthodoxy to modern religious mysticism.
I had fully intended to cycle the whole distance with the exception of one ferry ride across the Adriatic Sea from Brindisi, Italy to Igomenitsa, Greece. I cycled through central Italy, crossed Greece by cycling through the central and northeastern regions, and entered Istanbul, Turkey from the northwest arm. In Istanbul I was planning to cycle the final 700 kilometers into Konya where Rumi’s Tomb lies. I had anticipated that arriving at Rumi’s Tomb would have resulted in an earth-shattering revelatory “aha” moment.
Ancient Christian cave communities in Cappadokia, Turkey, 2014
But somewhere between Thessaloniki, Greece and Istanbul whatever it was that I was working through broke through me. I hadn’t completed the whole pilgrimage route that represented the orthodoxy/mysticism shift, but internally I had somehow come out the other side before reaching my “destination.” It was then that I made a decision that is so counter to my usual stubbornness. I took a bus to Cappadokia where I could visit the eerie landscape of this famous region as well as the caves that held ancient Christian communities for centuries.
I still cycled into Konya, but only cycled the last 250 kilometers rather than the original 700 kilometers that had been part of the “plan.” In many ways I rode as a pilgrim until I got to Istanbul and shifted more into the role of a tourist after that. That’s not completely true, but the work of the pilgrimage was largely done before Istanbul. After that I had places that I “just had to see!”
At a webinar last summer with the poet David Whyte, he captured this difference between planning and intention when he said, “What you plan is often too small for you to live.”
Planning is great. But too much planning can lead to small lives.
Set an intention and then let Life do the rest.